TO THE MEMORY OF M.B.

 

 

 

IN MEMORY OF MIKHAIL BULGAKOV

 

 

This, not graveyard roses, is my gift;

And I won't burn sticks of incense:

You died as unflinchingly as you lived,

With magnificent defiance.

Drank wine, and joked — were still the wittiest,

Choked on the stifling air.

You yourself let in the terrible guest

And stayed alone with her.

Now you're no more. And at your funeral feast

We can expect no comment from the mutes

On your high, stricken life. One voice at least

Must break that silence, like a flute.

O, who would have believed that I who have

been tossed

On a slow fire to smoulder, I, the buried days'

Orphan and weeping mother, I who have lost

Everything, and forgotten everyone, half-crazed —

Would be recalling one so full of energy

And will, and touched by that creative flame,

Who only yesterday, it seems, chatted to me,

Hiding the illness crucifying him.

House on the Fontanka, 1940

Trans. D.M. Thomas

***

“In Memory of M. B."

(1940) 

 

IN MEMORY OF MIKHAIL BULGAKOV 

 

 

This poem comes to you instead of flowers,

Graveyard roses, or incense smoke;

You who even in the final hours

Showed marvelous disdain. You drank wine. You joked

Like no one else. As for the rest—

You suffocated in a walled-off square;

You yourself admitted the terrible guest,

And remained alone with her there.

Now you don’t exist: no one says a thing

About your bitter and beautiful life;

Only my flutelike voice will sing

At this, your silent funeral feast.

It's unbelievable, to say the least,

That I, half-mad, mourning the past,

Smouldering on top of the slowest coal,

Having lost everything and forgotten them all,

Am fated to commemorate someone so strong,

Bright and steady to the final breath—

Was it yesterday we spoke? Has it been so long? —

Who hid the shuddering throes of death.

1940

M. A. Bulgakov: 1891-1940, well-known Russian writer.

Trans. Lyn Coffin

 

****

 

To the Memory of M.B. 

 

 

I give you this instead of roses on your grave,

Instead of the burning of incense;

You lived so sparely and, to the end, maintained

That magnificent disdain.

You drank wine, you joked like nobody else

And suffocated between those stifling walls,

And you yourself let in the terrible guest

And stayed with her alone.

And you are no more, and nothing is heard anywhere

About your noble and sorrowful life,

Only my voice, like a flute, sounds

At your silent funeral service.

Oh, who dared believe that I, half mad,

1, the mourner of perished days,

I, smoldering over a low flame,

Having lost everything and forgotten everyone—

I would have to commemorate the one who, full

of strength,

And will, and brilliant schemes,

Talked to me just yesterday it seems,

Concealing the trembling of mortal pain.

March 1940

Fountain House

Trans. Judith

****

Tưởng nhớ MIKHAIL BULGAKOV

Bài thơ này cho bạn, thay vì hoa

Hồng nghĩa trang, hay khói trước mồ

Bạn, những giờ cuối

Vẫn khinh khi lũ VC Nga thật là tuyệt cú mèo

Bạn uống hồng đào

Bạn chọc quê, kể chuyện hài, như chưa từng có ai làm được như thế

Về những gì còn lại –

Bạn nghẹt thở giữa bốn bức tường

Bạn, chính bạn đã chấp nhận vị khách khủng khiếp

Và một mình với nàng ở đó

Bây giờ bạn : Chẳng ai nói một điều gì

Về cuộc đời cay đắng và đẹp đẽ của bạn

Chỉ có giọng sáo diều của ta

Sẽ hát, ở đó,

Ở tang lễ im lìm của bạn

Thật là không thể tin nổi, chỉ nói thế thôi,

Rằng, ta, nửa khùng, nửa điên,

Tưởng niệm quá khứ

Âm ỉ trên đỉnh mớ than thấp, ở dưới đáy

Mất mọi thứ, và quên tất cả mọi thứ

Là người được số phận trao

Tưởng nhớ một người nào đó thật mãnh liệt,

Sáng ngời, và kiên định cho đến hơi thở chót –

Mà có phải là ngày hôm qua chúng ta nói tới? Sao lâu thế? –

Kẻ giấu những cơn giãy dụa của cái chết?

1940

Akhmatova

NQT dịch

Gấu mừng SN năm nay bằng bài này!

Sẽ có bản tiếng Mít liền.

Bài thơ "Tưởng niệm M.B." Gấu đã từng dịch, nhưng không khui ra được ý này. Anna Akhmatova tưởng niệm Michail Bulgakov và luôn cả chính mình. Và, vị khách khủng khiếp chính là cái chết. Từ đó bật ra ý của Brodsky, khi viện dẫn Montale:

Writing about Eugenio Montale, Joseph Brodsky observed that "death as a theme always produces a self-portrait."

NL coi "Thơ ở đâu xa" là bia mộ, và nếu thế, nó còn là chân dung tự hoạ của cả 1 thế hệ, và tưởng niệm đấy, nhưng cũng còn là tự bảo quản,

"In Memory of M. B." is a poem of memorialization and self-preservation. Here Akhmatova quietly but defiantly speaks on behalf both of Bulgakov and herself. She speaks against the many silences imposed by an autocratic regime, but especially against death, the ultimate silence.

Thần sầu. Tặng Gấu và bằng hữu của hắn!

To the Memory of M.B.

I give you this instead of roses on your grave,

Instead of the burning of incense;

You lived so sparely and, to the end, maintained

That magnificent disdain.

You drank wine, you joked like nobody else

And suffocated between those stifling walls,

And you yourself let in the terrible guest

And stayed with her alone.

And you are no more, and nothing is heard anywhere

About your noble and sorrowful life,

Only my voice, like a flute, sounds

At your silent funeral service.

Oh, who dared believe that I, half mad,

1, the mourner of perished days,

I, smoldering over a low flame,

Having lost everything and forgotten everyone—

I would have to commemorate the one who, full

of strength,

And will, and brilliant schemes,

Talked to me just yesterday it seems,

Concealing the trembling of mortal pain.

March 1940

Fountain House

Trans. Judith

****

Tưởng nhớ MIKHAIL BULGAKOV

Bài thơ này cho bạn, thay vì hoa

Hồng nghĩa trang, hay khói trước mồ

Bạn, những giờ cuối

Vẫn khinh khi lũ VC Nga thật là tuyệt cú mèo

Bạn uống hồng đào

Bạn chọc quê, kể chuyện hài, như chưa từng có ai làm được như thế

Về những gì còn lại –

Bạn nghẹt thở giữa bốn bức tường

Bạn, chính bạn đã chấp nhận vị khách khủng khiếp

Và một mình với nàng ở đó

Bây giờ bạn : Chẳng ai nói một điều gì

Về cuộc đời cay đắng và đẹp đẽ của bạn

Chỉ có giọng sáo diều của ta

Sẽ hát, ở đó,

Ở tang lễ im lìm của bạn

Thật là không thể tin nổi, chỉ nói thế thôi,

Rằng, ta, nửa khùng, nửa điên,

Tưởng niệm quá khứ

Âm ỉ trên đỉnh mớ than thấp, ở dưới đáy

Mất mọi thứ, và quên tất cả mọi thứ

Là người được số phận trao

Tưởng nhớ một người nào đó thật mãnh liệt,

Sáng ngời, và kiên định cho đến hơi thở chót –

Mà có phải là ngày hôm qua chúng ta nói tới? Sao lâu thế? –

Kẻ giấu những cơn giãy dụa của cái chết?

1940

Akhmatova

NQT dịch

 

 

ANNA AKHMATOVA 

 

"In Memory of M. B." 

 

(1940) 

 

This elegy by Anna Akhmatova honors the memory of Mikhail Bulgakov, a Russian doctor turned writer who composed plays, fiction, nonfiction, and various forms of journalism. He is most famous for his comic masterpiece “The Master and Margarita”, a fantastical modernist novel about, among other things, the devil's visit to the Soviet Union. Akhmatova wrote "In Memory of M. B." just after Bulgakov's death in March 1940, during the nightmares of Stalinist terror. The poem is part of the elegiac cycle "Wreath to the Dead" (1938-61):

“In Memory of M. B.”

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,

not sticks of burning incense.

You lived aloof, maintaining to the end

your magnificent disdain.

You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,

and suffocated inside stifling walls.

Alone you let the terrible stranger in,

and stayed with her alone.

Now you're gone, and nobody says a word

about your troubled and exalted life.

Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn

at your dumb funeral feast.

Oh, who would have believed that half-crazed I,

I, sick with grief for the buried past,

I, smoldering on a slow fire,

having lost everything and forgotten all,

would be fated to commemorate a man

so full of strength and will and bright inventions,

who only yesterday, it seems, chatted with me,

hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.

(Translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward) 

 

 

In the title of this poem Akhmatova uses the initials, rather than the full name, of the deceased. This is the first clue that the poet is writing under precarious political conditions that require extreme secrecy and discretion. Bulgakov had personally been blacklisted by Stalin. Most of his work was banned during his lifetime, very few of his plays were permitted to be performed, and he was prevented from leaving the country when he desperately desired to emigrate. Given his outcast status when he died, it was probably too dangerous to refer to him by his full name. Akhmatova instead addresses Mikhail Bulgakov directly, in the present tense, reinforcing a sense of a private communication between two intimates.

The poem's first lines, "Here is my gift, not roses on your grave, / not sticks of burning incense: also allude to the public erasure of figures thought to be political dissidents. For fear of reprisals the speaker doesn't dare observe traditional rituals of public mourning; instead, she must write a poem in private as her funereal offering. Just a title and two lines have already hinted at ways in which a tyrannical government silences its opponents. Silence and speech, private and public expression, will become one of the main themes of the poem.

As Joanna Trzeciak points out, this poem in Russian consists of a single stanza in what Russian scholars call "undivided quatrains." This means that each four-line unit acts as if it were a stand-alone quatrain. Akhmatova estabfished an elaborate formal system, impossible to replicate in translation, involving a regular “abab” rhyme scheme with alternating masculine and feminine rhymes, as well as a pattern of metrical symmetry, switching between iambic pentameter and iambic hexameter.

Osip Mandelstam once observed that the roots of Akhmatova's art lie in the nineteenth-century novel, in Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, and that her poetic form "was developed with a glance at psychological prose." In the first stanza the poet brings a prose writer's eye to her characterization of Bulgakov. She paints a portrait of a writer who, as much as he wanted to see his work published and performed, refused to become a mouthpiece for the government; rather, he bravely, stubbornly maintained his "magnificent disdain." Though he kept up a cosmopolitan persona, drinking wine and telling "the wittiest jokes:' privately he "suffocated inside stifling walls." Here Akhmatova literalizes as "stifling walls" the oppressive political forces that prevented him from traveling outside the country to live in artistic and political freedom.

Akhmatova also effectively characterizes the isolation Bulgakov must have felt for much of his life, given both his blacklisting by Stalin and his ongoing poor health. He suffered from serious injuries sustained on the front as a Red Cross doctor in World War I, from a near-fatal bout with typhus, and from an inherited kidney disorder. Emphasizing his dignity, his aloofness, and his private, solitary suffering, the speaker ends the stanza with the end of Bulgakov's life: "Alone you let the terrible stranger in, / and stayed with her alone." Reversing the usual idea of death as an active force, hunting people down and taking them away, she describes Bulgakov as an active participant in his own end, as he “lets” in death, "the terrible stranger:' and “stays” with her, as if he's faced death stoically, with great poise.

The second stanza begins with a powerful depiction of a double silence: "Now you're gone, and nobody says a word / about your troubled and exalted life." Here the speaker refers to both the silence of the deceased and the silence of his would-be mourners, who can't publicly grieve a person who's been deemed a "non-person." Then there is the silence of the "dumb funeral feast," which the speaker must counter with her "voice, like a flute." Trzeciak points out that the diction and language Akhmatova uses to begin the second stanza are strongly reminiscent of early nineteenth-century elegies from the Russian Golden Age. Even though the poet will mourn Bulgakov, the flute's piercing notes can sound only in the poem, in silence rather than performed in public, like the "gift" from the first stanza. The flute is also a reference to the elegiac tradition in poetry: ancient Greek elegies were chanted aloud and traditionally accompanied by a flute, the instrument of grief.

The speaker's sorrow expands from mourning the friend she has lost to mourning the life she has lost. Writing about Eugenio Montale, Joseph Brodsky observed that "death as a theme always produces a self-portrait." That becomes apparent here. Like Bulgakov, Akhmatova suffered from a ban on her work. Her ex-husband was prosecuted and shot; her son was arrested and imprisoned; many of her friends were killed, including Mandelstam, her greatest ally, who had been deported and died in a Siberian labor camp. She lived in poverty, trying to get her son released. No wonder Akhmatova's speaker describes herself as "half-crazed" and "smoldering on a slow fire: which parallels Bulgakov's "suffocating inside stifling walls." Given that she is "sick with grief for the buried past" — another devastating sort of silence exercised by tyrannical governments is erasure of the past — and "having lost everything and forgotten all," she is astonished that it has fallen to her to remember "a man / so full of strength and will and bright inventions." The poem closes with an indelible snapshot of the deceased writer, "who only yesterday, it seems, chatted with me, / hiding the tremor of his mortal pain." Even as he is speaking to his friend, Bulgakov is hiding his suffering, which summarizes in microcosm life during the Stalinist era.

Bulgakov diligently worked on "The Master and Margarita" until the month before his death, but the book wasn't published until 1967, in Paris. Similarly, although Akhmatova penned her elegy in 1940 from her house in Leningrad, it wasn't published until 1966. And yet, as Bulgakov puts it in one of the most memorable lines from his brilliant satire, "manuscripts don't burn." "In Memory of M. B." is a poem of memorialization and self-preservation. Here Akhmatova quietly but defiantly speaks on behalf both of Bulgakov and herself. She speaks against the many silences imposed by an autocratic regime, but especially against death, the ultimate silence.